An interactive agency serving our customers by helping them leverage technology to grow their business

Oct 20, 2009

How can a Content Management System benefit you and your company?

What is a Content Management System?
A content management system (CMS) is a web application that allows you to easily manage your website. A CMS can be an extremely powerful tool allowing you to create, manage, distribute, and publish information. Or it can be as simple as allowing you to update just one page of your site.

Common advantages of a CMS:

Huge savings.
A CMS requires a little more investment up front, but as you will see from the benefits below it can end up saving you a lot of money in the long run.

Reduced site maintenance costs.
Imagine being able to add a new page or upload your own pictures to your site without paying someone else or waiting on someone else.

Dynamic content.
Your content is stored in a database which means that it can be used in multiple places on the website. This also helps separate your content from the structure and design of your site allowing you to more easily update the design of your site in the future.

Daily updates, no technical skills required.
Now you don’t have to rely on a designer or programmer to update your site. Anyone with average knowledge of word processing can create and manage content. Using a simple editor you can format text and place pictures in just a few clicks.

Consistency of design is preserved.
Because content is stored separate from design, the content from all users is presented with the same, consistent design.

Navigation can be automatically generated.
Menus can be automatically generated as you publish new pages to your site. On top of that you can also re-organize your menus just by dragging and dropping them.

Should you consider a CMS for your site?
A CMS site has some distinct advantages over static ones as seen above. The most powerful is the ease of updating and adding content and pages to your site. It is extremely important to have fresh and up to date content on your site. Not only will your site benefit from the positive impression you will give a visitor with all of your relevant and timely information, but search engines also confer higher rank on websites that are frequently updated. A CMS makes updating your site easy, and you don’t need to know any HTML coding or programming languages. Editing your site is similar to using a word processing program, it is very user friendly.

For companies with multiple departments or various people responsible for updating web content, a CMS can help out tremendously. Employees can be given access to specific parts of the site for updating. Who edited a page and when it was last edited can also be tracked.

Why should you pay for a CMS when there are so many free ones out there?
The downside to an open-source, free CMS is that you generally need a lot of technical knowledge to install them and set them up. Then, you are stuck with the templates offered instead of getting a custom design that fits your company’s branding and marketing. You’ll also receive only limited technical support. Any bugs or errors in coding are unlikely to be fixed by the developer. So you’ll want to make sure you have the technical and programming expertise to support the system yourself.

At NetSource Technologies we specialize in building custom content management systems that fit your exact needs and just work. So why not contact us today to talk about getting your site up and running with a CMS that can benefit your bottom line!